Do Tell

Our unconscious reflexes know more about how we feel about something than we experience in self awareness.

Have you had an experience like this? You're talking with a friend. The friend says something that annoys you. Then almost instantaneously, your cognition resolves it, and the annoyance response vanishes. If this happens within a quarter of a second, you'll retain no conscious memory of it. 

At the same time, your friend may have picked up on the annoyance flashing across your face, and it made a big impression. 

You're friend says, "What's wrong/"

"Nothing," you say. 

"You were annoyed," your friend responds. 

"No I wasn't," you say mystified. 

"I could tell you were," your friend says now impatiently. 

Your friend read an unconscious tell of what you were thinking within that quarter of a second. It evaporated before it reached your consciousness. It held on for your friend. Both of you may now be baffled, frustrated, maybe distrustful, maybe maddeningly angry.

Neither of you is wrong. You have a different perception of reality. Something happened that was a manifestation of your brain, that the other person's brain registered, but your brain didn't.

Our brains are firing off these tells constantly. Not just facial expressions. It's the full range of our body language and behavior. Our mood may be reflected by an unconscious decision on what shirt we put on that morning. People who work together, go to university together, live in a neighborhood, often know when two people are in a sexual relationship, even when they are working hard to keep it a secret. That tell can be strong and humans are often strongly wired to pick up those signals.

What's further interesting is that there is a wide disparity in our sensitivity to these tells. Some of us are tuned to the point of constant distraction by others' tells. Others of us don't have a strong register for them.

What's worth exploring, and very challenging to explore are the deep unconscious biases that were embedded in us through the kinds of exposures during our early childhood development. We can have unconscious positive and negative reactions to someone's skin color, gender, ethnicity, cultural manners and mores, accents, sexual expressions, style and fashion that show  up from us energetically that we may even be shocked and ashamed of if we perceived it consciously.

We can think we are making rational and objective assessments of others, when,in fact, our unconscious reactions are driving our understandings.

I first encountered this research as part of my other studies in cognition in the 1980's. You may participate in the ongoing research by taking an Implicit Association Test. Neither I personally, Kairos Cognition, nor OpenBook Learning has any connection to this test or the organizations gathering and disseminating the research. Because it's measuring unconscious reflexive responses, many people find their own results produce a strong identity threat or denial. Most people find it hard to accept what they learn. For that reason, I'm not linking it. A simple search for Project Implicit or the Implicit Association Test, will bring it up. The site itself has this caution: "If you are unprepared to encounter interpretations you might find objectionable, please do not proceed further. You may prefer to examine general information about the IAT before deciding whether or not to proceed." 

That said, I refer to Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." 

Warm regards,
Francis Sopper